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The Best (& Most Intriguing) Resources For Learning About The State Of The Union Message

President Obama will be giving the yearly State Of The Union Message shortly. I’ve been accumulating related links since his 2011 State Of The Union Message, and will continue to do so. The most recent links can be found at the end.

It’s a little late, but I thought I’d bring together a few resources on annual speech given by U.S. Presidents. Some sites have done interesting things with word clouds and analyses of previous speeches. Somewhat ironically, the BBC has some of the best resources on the topic.

Here are my choices for The Best (& Most Intriguing) Resources For Learning About The State Of The Union Message:

provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2012. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document.

The New York Times has come up with a very creative interactive for the 2013 State of the Union address — you get to “cut-and-paste” your own one minute video highlight reel at My State of the Union Address in 60 Seconds. It lets you do the same with the Republican response.

They describe the first as “An interactive chart reveals how the words presidents use reflect the twists and turns of American history” and the second as “An interactive graphic shows the 1,410 different spots on the globe presidents have referenced in 224 speeches.”

My Second Book On Student Motivation!

My Second Book On Teaching ELLs

My book, "The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels," (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski) was published in the Summer of 2012